COSMIC TITAN

COSMIC TITAN

Nothing was distinguishable beyond a few yards, but his mind's eye could see the rest—the immense slug-like shape that extended in ponderous repose across the river valley, its head and tail spilling over the hills on either side, five miles apart. The beast was quiescent until morning—sleeping, if such things slept.

Above him lay the great black steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain to be climbed.

 Near the crest of the monster's back, he stumbled and fell hands and knees on the shagreen-roughness of the skin.

 Unmistakably even in the misty dawn-light, the hills and valleys of the rugose back were changing shape, as the vast protoplasmic mass below crawled, flowed beneath its integument. 

Fingers shaking, he unhitched the light ax from his belt and began to hack with feverish industry at the monster's crusted hide. 

The scaly, weathered epidermis seemed immeasurably thick. But at last he had chopped through it, reached the softer protoplasm beneath.The slabs of flesh he had cut off were gray and unappetizing, but he knew from the studies he had helped Sutton make that the monsters, extraterrestrial though they were, were in the basic chemistry of proteins, fats and carbohydrates one with man or the amoeba, and therefore might be—food. 

The scientists had found, in the burst bodies of the Titans that had been killed by atomic bombs, the answer to the riddle of these creatures' crossing of space: great vacuoles, pockets of gas that in the living animal could be under exceedingly high pressures, and that could be expelled to drive the monster in flight like a reaction engine. Rocket propulsion, of course, was nothing new to zoology; it was developed ages before man, by the squids and by those odd degenerate relatives of the vertebrates that are called tunicates because of their gaudy cellulose-plastic armor....
Robert Abernathy, Strange Exodus

Read Scott's essay about Strange Exodus & The Rotifers here.

This one presented me with two problems. First, since my blog is a bestiary meant to highlight the creature with no backgrounds, it's hard to give anything scale. So a creature from the natural world but larger is hard to convey. Giant slugs, giant crabs, giant frogs etc. I tried to do that by putting more detail into it's skin and having it rear up. 


Slug monsters from (L to R) C.L. Moore's Jirel Meets Magic, E.F. Benson's No Bird Sings // That Thing In the Hall and William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land

The second, is that I've been doing this a long time. I've illustrated hundreds of monsters from fantasy, sci-fi & weird fiction. So I've drawn a few giant slugs before. Which means, now I have to figure out how to draw this giant slug in an interesting way that's faithful to the story but also distinguish it from previous giant slugs I've drawn.


Gla'aki from Ramsey Campbell's The Inhabitant Of the Lake

The inflatable vacuoles gave me my inspiration. In the story the massive slugs inflate themselves to float into the sky and then space. I imagined their mantles being the main source of inflation so I gave them a huge hump. This also worked to have the slug rearing up...it provided scale but also made it look like it's beginning to ascend.

And here you can see the cover art for Planet Stories (Fall, 1950) by Allen Anderson and the interior art by Alden McWilliams. McWilliams illustration is cool but it's a worm, not a slug.